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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

More recent renewable inverters (solar PV and wind) and battery storage both have grid forming power control support. Term of art is "synthetic inertia" and makes spinning baseload obsolete. This has been shown under real world conditions most notably in South Australia with the Tesla Megapack based Hornsdale Power Reserve, which stepped in to maintain grid inertia when a coal plant exploded in 2021. For a more robust grid, you can deploy additional battery storage that can be called upon not only for energy, but also grid support.

(also replaces the need for synchronous condensers where they would typically be sited for grid ancillary services)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-26/queensland-blackout-c...

https://www.pscconsulting.com/australia-leans-in-on-syntheti...

https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr...

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/01/12/Tesla%20BESS%20G...

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Batteries on the grid are really more for load smoothing; demand/supply peak flattening and transient spikes. They're really too expensive to do what someone would think of as "storage".

Our recent govt installation is reported at $1.6bn for 2000MWh, which is incredibly expensive, and can't scale to run the grid, simply smooth load/demand diurnal curves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624390

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624308

https://www.vox.com/climate/408381/energy-transition-renewab... | https://archive.today/sZFxF

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

The $1.6bn for 2000MWh is the current price, so that includes all recent drops.

I'm not saying "at some point" batteries won't be viable as grid "storage", I'm just saying today they aren't.

I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage prices beyond batteries. And I was really surprised that this renovation is the same order of magnitude than a battery installation.

You are still correct in the sense that storage is still incredibly expensive per hour of demand stored, but batteries may very well already be the cheapest option out there

This is our local Australian one, and the build price is an absolute joke which pretty much everyone puts down to incompetence, is 12bn. It's 5x the cost of the above linked battery for 120x the capacity (350GWh vs 2GWh). And this should be in operation for a lot longer than batteries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Pow...

German has no height. For their 11m pumped storage a battery may come close. But for the mountainous countries around hydro storage is much more effective and cheaper. They do have up to 1000m and more. And they are terribly effective to hold the peaks and spikes. Austria and Switzerland are getting rich selling their peak capacity to the big countries nearby.

That particular reservoir may not have much elevation difference, but Germany is far from flat. There are many mountain ranges of a few hundred to over 1000 meters of elevation in the southern 65% or so of the country. They aren't impressive, but enough for pumped storage, at least if you only consider elevation differences.

Do you have some sources to their actual pricing? Some while ago I tried and came up blank. I assume your statements to be correct, because otherwise what would be the point of discussion, but I haven't been able to find any hard(ish) data

My source is a manager from a local energy company

Fair enough, unfortunately doesn’t help me. But thanks for the answer anyways

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